Getting Over Grad School

There are many lingering symptoms to the grad school disease. I'm working on getting rid of them.

The Symptoms:
1. Stress. I'm dealing with this one pretty well. I think I wrote yesterday that while I was in school, there was a ubiquitous tension in my bones. It's leaving. I will say that in ways it's hard to let it leave. I mean, as long as you're stressed, you (1) know you're alive and (2) have some sort of purpose to your life that is extremely evident. After all, there's something you care a lot about that's making you stressed. Still, that sort of thing giving you your reason for living isn't healthy, physically or spiritually. So, I'm letting that one go. We hope.

2. Grad School Gut. That's one of the worst things about grad school. What do you do in grad school? (1) You do homework, and when you're not doing homework, you're (2) worrying about the homework that you're not doing. The result of these two things is that you (1) don't exercise and (2) eat out because you can't spend that time you need to be doing homework cooking and (3) eat out because you're stressed and eating makes you feel less crappy and (4) you drink an absurd amount of coke because you desperately need the caffeine to stay awake to do more homework. The result of all of this is that you gain weight. I went into grad school weighing a little too little; I came out weighing a little too much. The grad school gut needs to go.

In the effort to start this process, I went jogging today. I mapped out a mile-long course in Will Hair Park. A mile used to be no problem. The problem: I haven't run since about the time I was a freshman in college. So, I nearly killed myself by the time I had gotten half of that mile done. I stopped myself. In addition to giving you a gut, grad school also gives you a slight bit of wisdom (or so I'm told), and so I knew that I couldn't get rid of that gut if I was dead (or maybe...?). Anyway, I stopped, and I walked a while. We'll do this slowly but surely.

Afterward, I went to Burger King. My fridge won't work yet, so there wasn't much else I could do for lunch.

3. Loss of People Skills. Frankly, I never had a whole lot of them, and because of that, I don't need to lose what I got. I may not have lost as many of these as did other things. I did have some excellent friends at TTU. The thing, though, is that they were only in a rather confined area. I mainly saw them at school. Now, we were all always at school, because we were always doing our homework, and so I saw them all quite a lot. And we did do a few non-school things together. But for whole areas of the life, I was definitely alone at grad school. For instance, at Wal-Mart, I wasn't going to run into anyone I knew. At church, I wasn't going to see anyone I knew. Walking across campus, I wasn't going to see anyone I knew (unless it was a student of mine, in which case, I was their professor--that's slightly weird). I had a small community. I didn't have a large community there. And that's a little weird here to adjust back into. I walk across campus to go to the post office, and people see me who knew me a year-and-a-half ago and wave and talk. Or, I go to Whataburger and run into two friends I've known since I was a freshman. I'm shocked every time. I'm going to have to think about why I think this is so weird a little more or why it's a little unsettling. Don't get me wrong, it's good. It's nice to be someone somewhere rather than anyone anywhere. But it's weird to adjust back into.

4. Being Stupid. I read somewhere that you're IQ drops in grad school because you're cramming too much in. It takes a while for it to come back. Believe me, I knew this before I read the study somewhere. I feel much stupider than I once was. My mind works a little more slowly. It's all coming back to me now though.

I'll end there for now. I intended this to be like a paragraph long, and it kept going. And I bet I could keep going. I won't bore you anymore though. Writing interesting stuff is another thing I lost. So it goes.